Inside the fight against malware attacks

Author

Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Texas Arlington

Disclosure statement

Christoph Csallner is currently a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and an academic editor of PeerJ Computer Science. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 1017305 and 1117369. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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When malicious software attacks, computer scientists and security researchers want to know how the attackers got into what was supposed to be a secure system, and what they’re actually doing that’s causing problems for users. It’s a growing problem, affecting government projects, retailstores and individuals around the world.

Analyzing malware

When an attack is discovered or reported, malware analysts work to get a copy of any software that’s being installed on target computers. When they begin examining it, an early topic of inquiry is how the malware managed to break into a computer network or system. That often uncovers security holes in commonly used operating systems or applications – which can then be disclosed to those programs’ authors, who can fix the flaws.

In addition, analysts try to figure out what a piece of malware does once it breaks in – how it travels through a computer and throughout a network, and what actions it takes, such as altering files, copying data, running programs or even installing new software to assist itself in the attack. Those actions can be described in ways that help malware detection tools catch future attacks before they can do damage.

Running malicious code

Doing any of that requires us to watch the malware in action. It would be nice if we could simply decode the software and dissect its instructions without actually running these malicious programs. But malware authors know we’ll be looking, so they take steps to make our jobs harder, such as compressing or encrypting their malware programs before setting them loose.

So our best option is to run the malware on our own computers. To prevent our own machines from being taken over or corrupted, though, we have to be careful. Typically we create what’s called a “virtual machine” – a program that simulates a fully functional computer but that does not have direct access to the computer’s files and hardware. Ideally, that would let us observe all the actions the malware tries to take without actually harming our own computers.

So far, however, there has been no single piece of software that can analyze every attack. Some malware programs operate on a very low technological level, working directly with very specific areas of a computer’s memory and hard drive storage systems, even changing how the computer works – so users can no longer trust the machines to do what is expected of them. Other malicious software works at higher levels, more like normal software that interacts with the operating system rather than the computer’s hardware directly. The most advanced malware attacks on both levels.

Most analysis tools focus on one or the other of those types of attacks – but not both. So they can’t catch everything, and – even for the malware they do detect – can’t show every action the malware takes. (Some analysis techniques involve running some anti-malware software in the virtual machine, but those programs are vulnerable to manipulation from the malware itself.)

Taking a fuller look

The program Shabnam Aboughadareh created, called SEMU, is the first malware analysis system that addresses all these problems. It operates fully outside the virtual machine, and watches closely what goes on inside it, to detect and log malware actions. That helps SEMU provide a comprehensive log of malware operations, which in turn reduces the manual effort required for a malware analyst to understand what the malware writer’s program was supposed to do.

That comprehensive log – recording events at the lowest levels of the virtual machine’s operating system – is the key to SEMU’s success, because it allows human analysts to track where and how malware manipulates aspects of the operating system.

When we tested SEMU against other malware analysis tools, we found that SEMU was the only publicly available tool that could detect all the activity – things like reading files, changing memory or file data, or sending information out over a network connection – needed to understand how the malware worked. By merging close examination of computer activity with detailed logging, and running in a safe environment where the malware couldn’t tamper with its monitoring, SEMU shows a direction for future analysis methods.